Pre-Code Capsules: STAMBOUL QUEST, MAN IN POSSESSION, JEWEL ROBBERY, ONE WAY PASSAGE, THE WORLD CHANGES

One of the punchier gutsier entries in the 'tycoons through the ages' sagas that unfurled tight and fast on the pre-code Warner's lot, this tale of the bug-eyed entrepreneur Chicago stockyards' founder reeks of greatness. It begins in the 1850s when Aline MacMahon and Donald Cook settle in the Dakotas, so isolated that they don't even learn about the Civil War until its over. Paul Muni plays their ambitious son who leaves for Texas to round up wild steer and drive them north to the railroad, setting up stockyards with Guy Kibbee in Chicago because from there they can ship east and west on the railroad; but Muni keeps maximizing profits and re-investing until he invents the the refrigerator car, so all the slaughtering can be done at home (as opposed to shipping live cattle) and the stench and profits rise and rise. McMahon looks on dolefully from afar, for truly no man was ever meant to have that much money, anymore than cattle aren't meant to grow up knee deep in their own shit.

She's right, it is monstrous, and Muni's kids grow up snotty and spoiled and his snob wife (Mary Astor) goes Lady Macbeth over the realization her privileges are paid for in enough oceans of abattoir run-off, shit and blood commingling and Muni wading in with a bucket to collect the pools of fat off the surface to feed back to the stock. The stench of her husband's clothes reaches even their tony suburb, and every morning he's still stomping through the manure and mud and measuring ways cattle can be crammed in closer and closer to make more and more money and more and more. And Chicago gets bigger and bigger and one is very grateful this isn't in color or smell-o-vision.

Only at Warners and only in the pre-code era would a film about the industrial revolution be so anti-capitalism and pro-local growers, and not preachy or sentimental even as the century turns. I'm sure the film was labeled communist propaganda in the 50s and forbidden for re-release except maybe in the Soviet Union. Muni (later blacklisted) gets hammy in spots but his energy is infectious; every nuance and spittle-flecked outburst is measured from zero to sixty like inexorable slow strangle clockwork as we watch him age through the Great Depression and in the end Aline McMahon swoops in to rescue the only two grandchildren who seem COME AND GET IT divided by UGETSU-level ready to return to McMahon's old school co-op. If you're a fan of McMahon from her frequent gold-digging with Joan Blondell and Ginger Rogers, this will be an eye-opener, her grace and good humor as the frontierswoman is such that not only can you believe a whole community would spring up around her,  you have a hankering to leave the city yourself, and find your own patch of land and some goats to call your own.  If only Monsanto would loosen our chains, but that won't happen 'til the last gasp of the earth is copyrighted and God sued for infringement. Seven generational thinking man. Our great great great great great great grandchildren will one day appreciate our careful recycling of paper and plastic through all eighteen of their mutant orifices. And Paul Muni and Paul Robeson will rise from their graves, like a thousand automated plowshares, like the commie rats they are!
Deep in the sweltering tropics a colony of W. Somerset Maugham-style prudes gossip about homewrecker Hugh (William Powell); he left Rangoon with one of the colonist's wives and has returned alone. Phillipa (Doris Kenyon) is the imported wife realizing her uptight doctor husband (Louis Calhern) isn't a man and a lover but "a machine of cold steel, as cold as the instruments you use to probe the bodies of unconscious patients on operating tables... " But is Phillipa in love with Hugh, or just using him as a tool to pry her out of her husband's grave-like surgeon hands? That they have the language to bring this point up themselves let's you know this is more 'adult' than the average soapy triangle. It's one of those adultery in the tropics stories that comes ripped from the commonwealth country club ala Maugham's THE SEVENTH VEIL and THE LETTER, wherein the heat of the tropics and a cold British husband leave a wife ripe for infidelity, and the censors are just relieved the other man is white. And what else are the ceaseless throb of native drums for if not to loosen white people's inhibitions?

Powell is great in a complex role where he's not entirely sympathetic; as the husband, Calhern nails the ferocity of the cuckolded, too intelligent to really buy into his own inflexible moral prudishness. As his younger sister, Marian Marsh does wonders even with very unflattering riding breeches, and Kenyon is surprisingly warm and sultry once she lets her hair down, the lighting is rich in that exotic pre-code way where palms and ferns cast long shadows, and the panama hats glow, and the hiss and muffling of the primitive sound recording compels everyone to speak slow and measured and some people don't go for that. But I love it -1931 is the great herald of what's the come, the air is thick with black and white magic, the girls with their little Norma Shearer arms bare and wearing sexually draped lingerie, backless gowns, and/or post-sex kimonos. What the speaking and movements lack in dramatic fluidity though, they make up for in daring. Marriage wasn't just a sacred institution in uptight southern states back in 1931, and being unafraid to leave a bad marriage and run off with William Powell without having to shoot yourself later showed real courage (for both character and studio) rather than loose morals.

The title is a quaint term for a deputy sheriff's assistant in London, since part of the job is remaining at a house that is in foreclosure or otherwise unable to pay its debts, making sure the debtor doesn't try to sell their stuff and run off with the money. Since it's based on a PJ Wodehouse play you can guess the rest: Robert Young stars as a well-groomed but criminally under-funded Cambridge alum, whose fist assignment is at the posh house and furnishings of an allegedly rich socialite (Irene Purcell) about to marry his brother. Naturally they fall in love. "I'd lie for you, I'd steal for you, I'd even work for you," was the line that got the biggest laugh out of me, but my jaw was on the floor after the surprisingly frank sexual hook-up. Purcell has lovely little bare arms, reminiscent of Norma Shearers. They loved little alabaster arms back in those days - and she's pretty damned sexy. There's a really risque fade-out and loads of clues making light of the fact that 'the butler indeed did it.' It's a great PG Wodehouse story given pre-code treatment and a play-ish but nonetheless engaging style.


Wodehouse can be tough to get just right in American hands, it's 90% Noel Coward and 10% Benny Hill. As he proved the same year with Shearer in Coward's PRIVATE LIVES, Young takes to such terrain absurdly well, like he never quite, but almost, gets the jokes, which is the perfect tone for Wodehouse. The small but tight cast includes C. Aubrey Smith as the harumphing mercantile class father and his Reginald Owen as one of those stuffy stooges with an umbrella that would eventually be played strictly by Ralph Bellamy. Beryl Mercer is the long-suffering mother; Charlotte Greenwood is a surly maid and Alan Mowbray the rich womanizing Sir Charles. He deserves better than to be dicked around just because he dicks around. After all, he tips Purcell's servants handsomely and bankrolled 'The Dump,' Godfrey Parks' nightclub, and if the whole concept of a cultured gentleman winding up getting married to his butler doesn't remind you of MY MAN GODFREY (1936) then go see it again at once. Alan Mowbray, the best friend a bum ever had.

Directed by William Dieterle with maximum class and reefer humor, JEWEL ROBBERY (1932) is a gem about a dashing jewel thief who catches the eye of bored thrill-seeking diplomat’s wife (Kay Francis) in scenic pre-Nazi Vienna. It’s the high class people doing naughty things sort of European froth that Hitler’s war machine would soon blow off the beery surface of the earth's frail mug, but here it still sparkles and bubbles and everyone is high, literally, since Powell passes out joints to his robbery victims. You’ll think you’re high too when you see longtime sourpuss character actor Clarence Wilson smoke one of these thinking it’s an ordinary cigarette, and Francis will blow your mind with her weird V-shaped smile and eyes that glaze over with the thought of being kidnapped by the dashing Powell. Their chemistry is so electrically charged you feel like they’re almost kissing each other even when they’re on opposite ends of the room.
The chemistry between them was so good in JEWEL ROBBERY it's small wonder Warners re-teamed them the same year in ONE WAY PASSAGE. Almost a sequel to the first film, with Powell a caught criminal sailing home to face execution and meeting Francis and falling in love... unaware her character is dying and only has a few weeks to live. The chemistry between Francis and Powell is electrifying yet urbane and smooth, like a very expensive cognac warmed by the fire.

Romantic comedies nowadays are full of children in grown up bodies, trying to make mothers out of each other before the love wears off and once again grow lost in unconscious consumerism and vehement, self-righteous denial. This film by contrast, is laden with grown-ups, and not a drop of stuffy morality taints their beautiful inherent decency as they walk to their deaths like it’s just another ocean voyage. One of the best recovered jewels in the TCM canon, it’s a testament to humanity’s lack of progress in the past 70 or so years that characters this warm, dashing, cool, romantic, witty, sweet and clever– “whole” people full of confidence, bravery and emotional gravitas--are so rare in movies. Romantic comedies nowadays are full of children in grown up bodies trying to make mothers out of each other so they can cry in a lap again and not have to grow up and thus, presumably, avoid having to face their own mortality. ONE WAY PASSAGE, by contrast, is laden with grown-ups, and not a drop of stuffy morality taints their beautiful inherent decency as they walk to death like it’s just another ocean voyage. Aline McMahon and Frank McHugh are the comedic second leads and great as usual, with Warren Hymer the cop who turns out to have a heart, et al.'

If you're a fan of TWENTIETH CENTURY (1934) imagine if that annoying college boy in Carole Lombard's train car--the one Barrymore convinces to stomp off, "without a word, like the Reverend Henry Davidson... in RAIN."-- only pretended to leave, and proceeded to keep ardently wooing until finally, against her better sense and our wishes, she falls in love with him. That's STAMBOUL QUEST, a film that dances ably along the censor's razor (the code took effect sometime in '34 so most films that year are either way racy or suddenly chaste). STAMBOUL seems somewhat risque so maybe it made it under the wire. Loy wears a fabulously slinky dress in the climax, which leaves us with at least for awhile the happy notion that Brent really has been shot by a firing squad. Hinting at the steep 'price one must pay' as a hot female spy in Austrian counter-intelligence, we learn right off what a conniving ruthless intellect she is when she starts the movie ratting out Mata Hari for falling in love with a Russian officer (Ramon Navarro in MGM's MATA HARI with Garbo; Victor McLagen or Von Sternberg's far-cooler 1931 version, DISHONORED). Of course, Frauleine Doktor' jinxes herself with pronouncements like that. Too bad for us it's the naive whimsicality of George Brent that woos away from trapping double agents, and he treads all over her machinations with his muddy American bungler feet. Ah well, Loy's gorgeous and operating several levels of above everyone else in the picture before falling for him. Maybe next war.